"What Paul Meant"

I was blown away by Garry Wills’ “What Paul Meant”: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670037933,00.html .
I have always felt uncomfortable with some of the utterances attributed to Paul as being inconsistent with his overall program. It turns out that almost half of Paul’s letters were definitely not written by him, but were written later by unknown authors with theological agendas. Moreover, a few items in the genuine letters are generally regarded by scholars as interpolations.

An exciting aspect of “What Paul Meant” is the invitation to read the authentic letters of Paul for what they were. They were letters to particular gatherings dealing with specific crises. Paul didn’t set out to write books of a Bible but to deal with immediate issues which arose in the various gatherings. His views appear to have evolved over his 17 year ministry and can be related to the unique circumstances of the gatherings he was addressing. Your theologically smug Corinthians wanted different advice than the Romans with their clashes between Jewish and Gentile believers.

A point I had never reflected upon before is that Paul’s letters preceded the Gospels by decades and reflected concepts in circulation immediately after Jesus’ ascension. By the time the Gospels were composed, Christianity was becoming more institutionalized, and the authors may have had an interest in bolstering emergent ideas about church governance and hierarchy and precedence. Even if this were not the case, a reader in the present century brings a lot of institutional baggage to the terms Paul uses. For example, the concept of a “church” is loaded with two millennia of semantic additions when Paul was referring simply to a “gathering” or assembly of believers. The “offices” familiar to us today were “functions” in Paul’s day.

Another intriguing aspect for me of “What Paul Meant” is the author’s problematization of the emphasis in modern Christianity on “personal salvation”. When Paul wrote about rescue, he was writing about the rescue of nations and the whole of Creation. The life in Christ was a life in community, not one of isolated individual personalities in separate communion with God.

“What Paul Meant”, especially when read alongside “What Jesus Meant”, is liberating. If I am willing to accept responsibility for interpreting Scripture in the light of the authors’ likely intentions and the context of authorship, I am rewarded with new insights and wisdom. I have come to have a new appreciation for Paul and the beauty of his letters and the significance of his mission.